Male Chick Culling

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Claire Hughes.)

I declare an interest: earlier this week, I hosted the “Ban Hatch and Dispatch” event in Parliament with the Vegetarian Society, as well as hosting a drop-in event the previous week. It was important to hear presentations from industry experts about the innovative and effective in-ovo testing laboratories in Europe, which offer a vision of what we could have here in the UK. I will be hosting a further event on 4 November and I encourage colleagues to attend. I am keenly awaiting the publication of the animal welfare strategy this autumn, and I hope that this topic will be discussed in it.

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this animal cruelty to the attention of the House. Considering the advances that have been made in determining the sex of chicks before they hatch, does she agree that there is absolutely no excuse for commercial egg producers to be routinely culling animals on such a massive scale?

I could not agree more.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Claire Hughes.)

I agree what my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke) said, and I will go on to say more about that.

Most people will not have heard of hatch and dispatch, which is a process of culling male chicks a few hours after they are born because they are not capable of laying eggs and do not grow fat enough to breed for meat. It is estimated that 6.5 billion newly hatched male chicks are culled globally every year, around 45 million of which are in the UK. Legally, live chicks can be killed using maceration, exposure to insert gas, or cervical dislocation, where no other method is available. In the 21st century, surely it is not acceptable that such a cruel practice takes place, when alternatives exist, as I will go on to describe.

In July 2023, the then Government’s Animal Welfare Committee released a report, “Opinion on chick culling alternatives”, which called to ban male chick culling and imports from systems that still use culling. The Committee advised that any future welfare labelling scheme should say whether the production system culled male chicks or used in-ovo technology, as well as calling for financial support for the introduction of new technologies and for wildlife rehabilitation projects, which are reliant on culled chicks for food.

In-ovo technology can determine the sex of a chick while it is in the egg, meaning that only female eggs will hatch and avoid the cruel cull. Research has shown that chick embryos can feel pain from around day 13 of egg incubation, so most in-ovo sexing systems operate between days eight and 12 of incubation. While some methods take small fluid samples, there are also non-invasive techniques, such as spectroscopy and hormone detection.

There is also significant progress in many other countries. Male chick culling is banned in Germany, France and Austria, while countries such as Italy have passed bans that will take effect in the future, and many other countries, including the United States and the Netherlands, among others, have adopted in-ovo technology voluntarily or through retail-led initiatives. I hope people here will agree that it is time that the UK catches up and introduces a ban on this cruel practice.

I thank the hon. Member for giving way—she is passionate about animal welfare. She mentions in-ovo technology identifying the sex of chicks. Similar technology has worked well in the dairy industry, where semen can be sexed before a cow is artificially inseminated, to ensure we have female cows rather than a surplus of male cows that end up getting culled at a young age. That is a successful programme in the dairy industry that could be replicated in the poultry industry.

I fully agree with what the hon. Member said and I think that is a good example to follow.

Two major hatcheries dominate the UK’s laying-hen sector. If we were able to introduce in-ovo sexing technology in just two hatcheries, we would be able to eradicate the vast majority of male chick culling in the UK’s commercial egg industry, so surely that is worth considering.

The public are vastly in favour of that as well. A poll by the Vegetarian Society in May found that 76% of respondents supported banning male chick culling even if it would result in a price increase of 1p per egg. In Westminster, over 30 MPs and peers from different parties signed a joint letter to the former Minister calling for a ban on male chick culling.

What would happen to eggs that are deemed to be male? The immediate answer would be to merge them with other hatchery biproducts used for energy generation, fertiliser or animal feeds. However, experts are also investigating the possibility that the eggs could be used to feed exotic animals in captivity. They could potentially be a high-value product as by day 12 the chick embryos have nails, beaks and bones, as well as not being sentient yet.

On a personal note, as a vegan for many years I find this whole discussion difficult, but it is important to highlight that currently culled chicks are being used as animal feed for captive raptors. However, animal by-products from slaughterhouses could be the best alternative, as this would be a circular and low-impact approach that would ultimately reduce the number of animals killed. Experts recommend that this should be a short-term solution, with long-term research focusing on cultivated meat, cultivated casting and even 3D-printed whole-prey alternatives.

The culling of live male chicks is a cruel and outdated practice. There is strong public support on this issue and wide international precedent. As with many others, I keenly await the animal welfare strategy this autumn, and I hope that the banning of the culling of male chicks will be a key aim of the strategy. It is important that a road map with a timeline is introduced to phase out this cruel practice and that male chick culling and imports are a thing of the past.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for securing this debate. She raised this issue in a Westminster Hall debate on animal welfare standards in farming in June, and I am grateful to her for giving us the opportunity to focus on the subject in more detail today. I fully recognise that there is strong public feeling on the routine culling of male chicks, as highlighted by the breadth of support that the Vegetarian Society’s “Ban Hatch & Dispatch” campaign has attracted. My hon. Friend has spoken passionately on the subject this evening.

As a nation, we are rightly proud of the high animal welfare standards that underpin our high-quality British produce. This Government want to build on and maintain our world-leading record on animal health and welfare, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring that animals receive the care, respect and protection that they deserve. I completely understand that the culling of day-old chicks is a process that many, including someone not far away from this Dispatch Box, may find incomprehensible and wasteful.

I assure my hon. Friend that all farm animals are protected by comprehensive and robust animal health and welfare legislation, including when they are killed. Regulations set out strict requirements to protect the welfare of animals at the time of killing, which includes male chicks in the egg production sector. As she pointed out, the permitted killing methods for chicks, such as gas stunning, are based on scientific research and assessment to ensure that the birds are spared any avoidable pain, distress or suffering. All laying hen hatcheries in the UK use argon gas mixtures as their stunning method. That is a much more humane method than other gases, such as carbon dioxide, which is routinely used in several European countries and elsewhere in the world.

However, as has been commented by the Animal Welfare Committee—an expert committee advising the UK, Scottish and Welsh Governments on animal welfare issues—the routine killing of chicks is principally an ethical issue, rather than a welfare problem, because it does not lead to direct welfare harms. Of course, that does not mean that we should not work to see if we can move away from it in the future as quickly as is practical and possible. Being able to do that relies on viable alternatives being developed; my hon. Friend talked about some of those in her remarks.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) on securing the debate and outlining so eloquently the case for this cause, which I support. Given that we use many male chick carcases for animal feed, pet food and places like bird of prey centres, and we import far more than we use, does the Minister agree that we need to find a solution to meet that need, if we are, as I hope, to eventually move to in-ovo sexing in hatcheries?

I agree that when a supply chain, however difficult, is established and we try to move away from it, there can be unintended consequences. We have to look at the whole series of issues along that chain, so that we do not end up in a situation that has lower welfare outcomes than the one we started with. I assure my hon. Friend that the Department is well aware of that, and we will not move in any way if we would end up in a worse welfare situation than the one we started with, but he makes a perfectly good point.

As I was about to say, another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals, and we would have to replace that.

In recent years, there has been phenomenal global progress in the development of technologies that could help to end routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining embryo sex before hatching, and it appears that this is going on in the dairy industry as well. There is clearly a lot of scientific work going on to see what we can do to get away from the current situation in our livestock supply chains. Several new methods and systems have appeared, and many refinements in existing systems have continued, since the publication of the Animal Welfare Committee’s report on this subject.

We welcome the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day-zero sexing technology, which enables eggs to be sexed prior to the start of their incubation. Such a commercial system offers many benefits, including economic and sustainability savings by directly freeing up hatchery space, in addition to providing an ethical solution to the culling of chicks.

In Germany, one alternative is the rearing of male layer chicks for meat production, also known as brother hens. Due to their slower growth rate, rearing brother hens requires a greater input of feed and a longer rearing phase to produce a smaller bird with less desirable body composition, making it more challenging to rear them commercially at scale in the UK. There is a lack of published research on the welfare of brother hens, but animal welfare concerns have been linked to this practice. In particular, managing aggression and high mortality within all-male flocks can be problematic, often accentuated by housing inappropriate to the birds’ behavioural needs.

That was incredibly educational.